The historian must not be confounded with the scholar. The chief tasks of the latter are the critical examination of historical records, the determining and grouping of facts, the identifying and differentiating of persons, the demarcation of time and place, and the defining and demonstrating of the causal relation between events, their succession, and their interaction. The minute details to which his research happens to be devoted at any moment are as important in his eyes as great and comprehensive principles. Style, form, and manner, moreover, are minor considerations with the scholar; he aims only at accuracy and lucid presentation adapted to the subject-matter. The demands made upon the historian are more numerous and more exacting. He must constantly carry the whole in mind, he must have the ability to mould the historical material with an artist’s creative power and restore the faded features of the past by the life-bestowing word. First of all, he must be equipped with unlimited mastery over the existing material and with easy and sure grasp of all the phases of the historical process, in order to be able to estimate every phenomenon duly, according to its intrinsic value and its external effect, emphasize characteristic and significant points, and allot to persons and events their proper place in the historical succession. He cannot, of course, dispense with the acumen that intuitively arrives at the inwardness of every detail. For it is needful, not only to determine with critical penetration the trustworthiness of existing traditions and documents, but also to discern and demonstrate, as one traces the course of a stream with its tributaries and branches, the presence of the primal forces at work under the surface of things, giving them impetus and direction, and of the factors that impede, strengthen, or divert the action of these forces. From investigations of this kind the historian should derive the chief points of view, those which grow naturally and logically out of the course of events. The true historian must be endowed to a high degree with a faculty for presaging, amounting almost to divination, that he may, like a “backward-looking prophet,” overcome the inadequacy and incompleteness of the material transmitted to him; restore the defective parts by means of his plastic fancy; and everywhere recognize as well as bring to the recognition of his readers, that historical events in their connection are developments from within outward, the outcome, not of a game of chance, but of the workings of absolute law. For such results of his research and insight the historian must then find adequate expression. His presentation of them must serve as the clear, polished mirror reflecting the play of many-hued, chaotic details in distinct and simply grouped pictures, and permitting the peculiarities and characteristics of single persons and events to be apparent, as the warp and the woof are distinguishable in the finished fabric.